Protecting and securing data is one of the primary concerns that must be addressed when designing an information management system, whether for a single user, small business or large scale data warehouse. Oftentimes, data may be continually archived on various removable storage medium, such as tape cartridges or optical disks. When archiving data on tape or other removable storage medium, one security concern is that the storage medium may be lost or stolen, especially during transport, and sensitive data on the storage medium may be discovered. Also, if the storage medium can be accessed through remote commands transmitted over a network, then there is a concern that someone may “hack” into the system, access the storage medium and then access the data.
Data on removable storage media, such as medical records, financial records or other archived information, must be kept for a certain retention period, however beyond that retention period the media that contains the data must be securely destroyed. Further, when it is detected that a particular piece of media is defective or unreliable (i.e. there are a certain number of errors detected during reading and/or writing by the data storage drive, library, or host computer), data on the defective media should be transferred to another piece of the media. The defective piece of media may still have some readable data and may need to be securely destroyed.
To protect confidential or sensitive data (e.g. credit card information, medical records, social security numbers, etc.) and to maintain customer privacy it is advantageous to perform a shredding process on certain storage media once it is no longer useful so that it is no longer accessible or recoverable. Shredding is defined herein as destroying or otherwise rendering data stored on a removable storage media permanently unreadable by any reasonable means.
Some customers may erase or overwrite the media to avoid unwanted access to the data contained on the media. To securely overwrite media, such as magnetic tape media, the entire tape should be overwritten one or more times utilizing a data pattern that contains one of logical ones, zeroes, or some combination thereof. Tape cartridges can hold up to a terabyte of information and thus, the process to erase or overwrite just one piece of media can take hours, consuming valuable resources. This burden on resources can be especially troublesome during bulk erase processes when large amounts of media must be erased.
Other customers may pay a 3rd party to properly destroy the media by a mechanical process such as by melting, burning, or degaussing. However, this option can be very costly as well as open the removable media up to aforementioned risks during transport. In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a method to securely erase and eliminate access to data on removable storage media that is both inexpensive and does not usurp valuable resources.